We’re Bringing Shaming Back 🎵
  February 19, 2026 Salutations, Meteor readers, Yesterday, Cardi B teased a new haircare line, and while I enjoy a tease as much as the next gal, my daughter is scheduled for a wash day this weekend, so we can’t wait for April. Give us the goods, Cardi!  In today’s newsletter, we are visited by the ghosts of misogynists past. Plus, we kick off a new series, The One Who Got the Story, with a conversation with journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Adding to cart, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONFear and loathing: You may have heard that blatant misogyny is making a comeback. You may, in turn, have gotten used to people with an incredible level of power and influence saying wildly sexist things without consequence. Last week was no exception: White supremacist and far-right livestreamer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago, went on a tirade about women that seemed extreme even for him, calling for “all women” to be “sent to the gulags” and dubbing women America’s “number one political enemy.” Since it’s my job to trawl for news about women, I clocked these shocking comments. But did mainstream outlets? Did you? The episode, and the general shrug with which they were met, clarified something for me: The way we react (or don’t react) to public declarations of misogyny has changed. Allow me to take you back to 2012, years before the student-led campus rape movement, Trump’s election, and the seismic shift ushered in by #MeToo. The “war on women” was on the rise, yes, but so was the “fourth wave” of feminism. The missteps of prominent men were meticulously covered by a thriving feminist media ecosystem. Jezebel’s page views regularly surpassed those of its parent blog Gawker. In February of that year, rightwing talk show host Rush Limbaugh went on a screed that, compared to Fuentes’s vitriol, seems downright restrained in retrospect: After Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke testified before Congress about the onerous costs of birth control at her university, Limbaugh devoted a sizeable chunk of his talk show to calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” who “wants to be paid to have sex.” He then advised the women at Georgetown to put aspirin between their knees. With the help of Fluke’s sharp public response, the fallout was swift and bipartisan: Limbaugh’s comments were “misogynist” and “vitriolic,” said Georgetown’s president. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx.) called them “over the top”; Sen John McCain (R-Ariz.) said they were “totally unacceptable.” President Obama placed a supportive call to Fluke. Limbaugh’s show lost 45 sponsors, even after he posted an apology (of sorts) on his website.  FLUKE DURING HER TESTIMONY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Later that summer, another powerful white man said another awful thing. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), a vehemently anti-abortion politician who had just won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, explained on a St. Louis TV station that rape from pregnancy is rare. “If it’s a legitimate rape,” he said, “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Again, there was immediate backlash from all sides. Everyone from the Washington Post editorial board to leading health experts to then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney condemned Akin’s comments and clarified that “legitimate rape” is not a thing. Mainstream media covered every move of the controversy. Despite multiple apologies, Akin ended up losing his Senate race by 16 percentage points. Can you imagine any of this happening today? These two incidents were early examples of the willingness of women to call men out during the 2010s, a process that set the stage for #MeToo in 2017. One way to interpret our current moment of male supremacy is that it’s happening despite all that valiant earlier activism. But, looked at another way, it’s also happening because of the successes of this period. Men of all stripes—not just lunatics like Nick Fuentes but more genteel types like Ross “Are Women Ruining the Workplace?” Douthat—are pissed about exactly the kind of influence feminists started to have, and now they’re on their revenge tour. That tour isn’t powered by victory; it’s powered by fear. Feminist philosopher Kate Manne, who charges Douthat with “sanewashing” these men’s anger, describes Fuentes’ rhetoric as an “openly hysterical expression of patriarchal fear”—fear that women will speak up, get ahead, and take away men’s long-afforded privileges. They reflect a desire some men feel to remain shameless and unapologetic, a feat neither Akin nor Limbaugh achieved (although the latter continued his career and was eventually awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by guess who). It’s the same fear of being humiliated many women saw when they watched Renee Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE agent: the laughter of Good’s wife to his face, the three bullet wounds in Good’s body, the “fucking bitch” out of the agent’s mouth. Men’s fear can be deadly, but it also reveals the extent of women’s power. Demanding accountability worked in 2012. It worked in 2017. It can work again. —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:Â
 THE ONE BEHIND THE STORY“I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy.”Lulu Garcia-Navarro on interviewing Gisèle PelicotBY NONA WILLIS-ARONOWITZ  GARCIA-NAVARRO AND PELICOT AT AN APARTMENT IN PARIS. (SCREENSHOT VIA THE NEW YORK TIMES) Lulu Garcia-Navarro, co-host of the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” has covered harrowing circumstances all over the world for the Times, NPR, and the Associated Press. She’s reported on everything from the war in Iraq to the Arab Spring uprisings to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But her recent interview with Gisèle Pelicot, she told me, was one of the hardest she’s ever done. In our new series, The One Who Got the Story—where we catch up with a woman or non-binary journalist who was behind a major story of the week—we ask Garcia-Navarro how she prepared to interview a woman who endured some of the most shocking sexual abuse one can imagine. Pelicot, whose husband secretly drugged her and invited dozens of men into their home to rape her, made the extraordinary decision during the trial to waive her right to anonymity and allow media in the courtroom. And yet, she’d never truly told her story—until now. On the occasion of her new book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, Pelicot, 72, sat down with Garcia-Navarro for her first interview with an American outlet. It’s a sensitive yet unflinching conversation about pain and renewal. Here’s how Garcia-Navarro did it. I noticed in the beginning of the interview, you asked Gisèle how she’d like you to refer to her rapist (she answered, “Monsieur Pelicot”), and that struck me as a question specifically tailored to someone who’s gone through trauma. What kind of preparation did you do before talking to her? Because she had never spoken [to the media] outside of the confines of the trial, I didn’t know what I was going to get. Some victims of trauma really have trouble articulating their interior life, how they might have felt about things, their recollections of things. So we just prepared by being extremely careful. We made sure that where the interview was going to take place was going to be a very intimate environment. [The crew rented an apartment in Paris for the interview.] The majority of the crew was female. And then I wanted to make sure she knew she had autonomy and she had her voice. [Asking her what she’d like to call her abuser] was a way for me to signal that this was something she had agency over. You were extremely careful, but you also didn’t shy away from the awful details. At one point you quoted a graphic passage of the book in which Gisèle notices that a crown in her mouth was loose, which she learned later was a result of, as she wrote, “the violence of penises being repeatedly forced into [her] mouth.” Can you explain more about the reasoning to include this? I know that there’s great concern about retraumatizing people and I understand that. I also do feel that sometimes, in trying to protect the victim, we do a disservice to the audience in not really showing the full scope of the horror that somebody went through. I asked for her permission [beforehand]; I said I was going to quote directly from the book, and she said that that was fine. I tried to be as sparing as I could. I just used one line, but it was a line that really haunted me. It said so much about the dynamic between her and her ex-husband, how he gaslit her, how he manipulated her…I felt it was really important for people to know. You’ve reported amid conflict zones and revolutions, but how does this interview rank in terms of difficulty? I mean, 100 out of 10. It’s one of the hardest interviews that I’ve done because I think it’s just really hard to get right. And if I did, I’m grateful for it. A consistent theme is that people said that they went in bracing for the worst and thinking this was just going to be a tour of horror. What they found instead was her beautiful ability to explain her own experience. This interview has been condensed and edited.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
